Will 'OK!' magazine's morbid Jacko cover win newsstand sales?

This week, OK! Weekly made a brazen move in publishing a photo of a dying Michael Jackson on its cover. (See the full cover here.) With the cover—for which owner Richard Desmond reportedly paid the equivalent of $500,000 in U.S. dollars—the British-owned celebrity mag is going to stick out on the newsstand among competing news and celebrity magazines with their flattering tribute issues, which is precisely what OK! is going for. Yet it might seem like a move of desperation on the part of OK!, in the context of the frequent masthead changes, soft newsstand sales and editorial zig-zagging that have made OK! itself the subject of some less than flattering media coverage. After tilting toward celebrity lifestyle coverage, it would now appear to be swinging back toward hard news with this issue. So, with the Jackson cover, it risks not only offending fans but confusing them. Maybe it’ll turn out to be a win for them on the newsstand. But if not, it’ll be not only a big misstep, but a costly one.

—Posted by Lucia Moses